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A new level of collaboration

A new level of collaboration

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something... -Frank Gehry

I really like this quote from the architect Frank Gehry, because it ties something we often think of as rigid - architecture - with something we think of as flowing and free-form - jazz music. When you think about it, architecture needs to be alive and flowing because it’s about people, whether it’s for business, a residence, or a public space. When we work together building software, we need that same sort of integration. There’s plenty of structure, but it’s fluid, allowing easy handoffs of code and other artifacts from one team to the next. That’s why we called our collaborative development platform “Jazz” in the first place.

The rising complexity in software and systems delivery makes free-flowing collaboration all the more critical for teams to succeed. There’s complexity in the development environment, in the highly interdependent network we call the supply chain, and in the deployment environment as well. Most software developed today must interact reliably and predictably in a “system of systems.” In almost every industry we’re seeing that effectively designing, delivering, and managing these highly interdependent software systems can spell the difference between leading and lagging within a given market.

Organizations need better ways to handle the risks, manage all this complexity, and lower costs in the process.

Better collaboration is the key. As Scott Ambler has recently written, “collaboration is the hallmark of agility.” It helps team members learn from each other as they find creative ways to solve problems, meet deadlines, and deliver on their innovative potential. Just like jazz in the musical sense, effective collaboration in a co-located work space produces superior results. But what happens as multi-site, and even multi-national team distribution becomes a reality for more and more organizations? That’s where Jazz in the software-development sense can offer tremendous benefits. Along with best practices from IBM Rational, Jazz can help teams enjoy the benefits of close collaboration, even when they’re working across distances and time zones.

The stakes are high for software teams, because the software component of today’s products is where the competitive advantage lies. Innovation in software design and delivery is increasingly at the heart of market success. And good collaboration can help you get their faster.

I’d like you to see for yourself how Jazz-based collaboration can help cut through the complexity of developing and delivering smarter products, systems, and software. At this year’s Innovate, we will be announcing new and enhanced capabilities for collaboration across stakeholders at every stage of the software and systems engineering lifecycles:

Collaborative Design Management helps you manage complexity with design collaboration across the lifecycle enabled by a central design hub built on Jazz.

Collaborative Lifecycle Management quickly improves your development team’s time-to-market, quality and value and works for any plan, any process and any platform.

Collaborative Development and Operations improves efficiency across software and product delivery lifecycle by connecting development and operations.

New Rational community initiatives empower the community of users to grow skills and share expertise.

And to build upon last year’s announcement, we are extending the capabilities of our Rational Solution for Systems and Software Engineering with industry-specific core processes, best practices, templates, and services for both the Aerospace & Defense and Automotive industries – and building new capabilities around high-focus areas like safety-critical development. This supports collaboration, workflows, tasks, and management of the work products essential to a complex product development.